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Some Core Concepts

1. Scientific Inquiry

We all (kind of) know that science, understood in the sense of natural science, is
about developing testable theories about natural phenomena. In this sort of
science, one tries to describe and explain a maximum of phenomena with a
minimal number of theoretical principles. Science often involves postulating
principles and entities that are not immediately visible or obvious, such as the
gravity operating between bodies, or atoms, electrons, quarks etc. The fact that
these are neither obvious nor visible doesn’t make them any less real or operative.
What counts is that they can give the best and simplest description and
explanation of the phenomena that are visible and observable: The planetary
model that has the earth revolve around itself once each day and around the sun
once in a year indeed both explains and describes what we see when we say “The
sun goes up in the morning and down each evening.”

2. The Science of Language

Linguistics or at least parts of it can also be regarded as a natural science that tries
to develop testable theories, i.e., theories that can be shown to be wrong. Theories
are shown to be wrong or at least incomplete if they make the wrong predictions;
one such case is the linguistic hypothesis that pronouns, as their name seems to
indicate, are stand ins for nouns. This hypothesis can be shown to be false by
trying to replace the two nouns in the following sentence with appropriate
pronouns:

 ThatArticle stupidAdjective manNoun sankVerb theArticle boatNoun

 ThatArticle stupidAdjective hePronoun sankVerb theArticle itPronoun

Rather, in order to find out what a pronoun is, we should postulate bigger units
called noun phrases (NPs) with nouns as their center:

 (ThatArticle stupidAdjective manNoun)NP sankVerb (theArticle boatNoun)NP 

 HePronoun sankVerb itPronoun

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Even though the new hypothesis works with a new invisible entity, NP, it is
certainly better than the old one that only has less abstract elements such as nouns
but gets the facts wrong. Note that that does not mean that the new hypothesis is
perfect; in the process of further investigation it may also be shown to be false or at
least incomplete. The above is, by the way, an example of something that is
characteristic for science, namely, for an experiment, even though a low-tech one.

3. The Cognitive Revolution

The cognitive revolution in the late 1950s, also addressed in Foundations of

Psycholinguistics, changed the perspective of many researchers on language quite
profoundly. Rather than just looking at linguistic data in written and spoken
corpora, or, in the case of children, the input children received when they acquired
a language, they asked the questions, “What does it mean to know a language?”,
“What exactly does this knowledge consist of?”, and finally, how is it possible for
a child to acquire this knowledge?”

They quickly discarded the idea that the acquisition process could simply consist
in the child’s imitation of the data around it or in the child’s being given positive
or negative reinforcement (aka. praise or correction) when it produced the right
kind of language. The first process was shown to be insufficient, because a
speaker of a language maximally hears a couple of millions of sentences as a
child but ends up being able to produce and understand an infinity of them. The
second process was shown to be both unnecessary and useless, because actual
observation showed that many children are not praised or corrected with regard to
the grammar of their speech, and that even if that happened, it had no measurable
effect.

The idea gained ground that the explanation for the spontaneous, quick, and
effortless acquisition process in children had to be looked for in the cognitive
make-up of the child itself. The question “What’s in the external linguistic data?”
became replaced by the two questions, “What’s in the mind/cognition of an adult
speaker who knows a language?”, and “What’s in the mind/cognition of a child so
that it can acquire this knowledge?” The search for a uniform set of general
principles valid for all languages of the world, also called Universal Grammar
(UG), was on. This set of principles had to be restrictive enough to explain why
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the languages of the world have so much in common (like nouns, verbs,
hierarchical sentence structure etc.). At the same time, this set of principles had to
allow for a considerable amount of variation, since of course we know that the
7,000 languages of the world (and there are additional ones that have died out and
still other ones not yet born) do vary to a considerable degree. The principles thus
had to contain parameters that specified just how the principles were realized in
each particular language. In the 1980s, this developed into a Principles and
Parameters Theory in which the principles described the commonalities and the
parameters the variations between languages.